Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

me.
    “Are we going to have another hot night, Brother Saul?” I quipped.
    He frowned. “If you don’t start watching your mouth, we might not have any nights left in Purity at all. Look, Lena, most of the men around here hate me, and now they’re beginning to hate you, too, yet you haven’t even come close to finding out who killed Prophet Solomon, have you?”
    “No, but…”
    He interrupted me. “I wasn’t going to tell you this because I didn’t want to worry you, but you’d better start seeing some action on this case, because both of us may be gone soon. Remember why I drove into town yesterday, before all the offal hit the fan?”
    I thought for a minute. “To see your attorney?”
    He nodded. “Well, he told me I’ll almost certainly lose my case, and even tried to get me to settle out of court.”
    My heart sank. “What kind of settlement?”
    “The compound’s attorneys have offered me ten thousand dollars to drop the case now and just walk away from the house.”
    I couldn’t believe it. “But this house has to be worth ten times that!”
    “Sure is, but the alternative is not only to lose everything, but to have to pay court costs, too. Apparently the agreement I signed with Solomon to hand over all my money in exchange for the ‘protection and friendship of Purity’ is legally binding.” His voice was steady, but his knuckles, as he knotted his hands into fists again, were white.
    “It can’t be!”
    He gave a hollow laugh. “That house where you’re learning how to cook? Well, I didn’t know this before, but my attorney says it used to belong to someone else before Solomon took it over and did all those add-ons. The folks that owned it originally, they had a falling out with the Purity Fellowship Foundation over the Social Security check issue, just like I did. They went to court, and they lost everything. They lost the house, their cows, their farm equipment, everything. They even wound up having to leave a bunch of older daughters and grandkids behind when they moved. They’re not even allowed to visit them now.”
    Saul didn’t have any children to leave behind, but losing the house you’d built with your own loving hands had to be tough. Still, he’d walked into the deal with his eyes wide open, the rules laid out before him in black and white on the contract every new member of the compound was ordered to sign.
    And he’d signed it.
    I sighed. “Maybe you should take the offer and salvage what you can. If you do, how long will you have before you have to be out of the compound?”
    “Thirty days.”
    Probably enough time for me to do what I needed to do, but my heart ached for Saul. Even if he was a murderer.
    “What will you do about Ruby?” I asked.
    “That’s up to her,” he said morosely.
    Ruby served boiled chicken sandwiches again for dinner, and I didn’t even attempt to eat them. Instead, I nuked myself some Ramen noodles, and when Saul requested it, nuked some for him, too. Ruby’s sandwiches sat congealing on the platter.
    After Ruby and I squabbled over who’d do the dishes and I lost, I finished them as quickly as I could. Then I left the house and walked around the compound in the fading light, admiring the flame-colored cliffs, enjoying the cool breeze wafting from Paiute Canyon. Cactus wrens called softly to one another, and in the distance, a coyote howled at the thin rising moon.
    The evening radiated peace. Men leaned against the rusting hulks in Prophet’s Park, talking softly to one another about the burdens of the day, while on the porches, their white-aproned wives stripped freshly picked green beans and tossed them into large kettles. I knew that in the poorest households, the beans would be boiled for hours with fatback and eaten as a main dish, the sparse meal rounded out by buttered slices of cornbread.
    In this dim light I couldn’t see the poor quality of the buildings, the drawn faces of the women, the pregnant bellies of girls who should be worrying about nothing more momentous than the latest boy band.
    And I heard the voices of the children, hundreds of them, laughing, singing. I was struck by how happy they all sounded. They were untouched by school shootings, random crime, or live broadcasts of terrorists acts. Their families, however peculiar, remained intact, and they had all the playmates they could wish for—most of them well-behaved. While their haphazard education and lack of knowledge of the way the world worked